“The earthly home becomes a world only when objects as a whole are produced and organized in such a way that they may withstand the consumptive life-process of human beings living among them – and may outlive human beings, who are mortal.”

–Hannah Arendt, “Culture and Politics”

In reflections upon the writings of Hannah Arendt, specifically The Human Condition, scholars traditionally respond to her concepts of politics, action, and the public realm. And rightly so: these concepts are undeniably at the core of Arendt’s philosophy, sometimes quite ambiguous in their definition, and hence often in need of scholarly analysis. However, meaningful responses to Arendt’s interpretation of work are quite rare. That might not be a surprise. In her writings, the category of work remains underexposed. One might even argue that beyond the chapter on Work in The Human Condition, only in the essays “Crisis in Culture” (1961) and the preceding “Kultur und Politik” (1959) does work receive any significant attention. Of course, scores of her critics have argued that the categories of human activity – labor, work, and action – are much more intermixed in real life than how Arendt understands them. But this does not undermine the basic tenets of Arendt’s philosophy. Continue reading →

“That the arts must be functional, that cathedrals fulfill a religious need of society, that a picture is born from the need for self-expression in the individual painter and that it is looked at because of a desire for self-perfection in the spectator, all these notions are so unconnected with art and historically so new that one is tempted simply to dismiss them as modern prejudices.”

-Hannah Arendt, “Crisis in Culture”

Today, within the context of contemporary art, post-Marcel Duchamp, post-Sherrie Levine, it’s no longer interesting to ask the question “What is art?” Anything and everything can now be appropriated into art’s frame or become part of an artwork. In Andrea Fraser’s words, “It’s art when I say its art.”

When we approach contemporary art with Hannah Arendt in mind, however, we must begin by understanding what she means when she uses the word, “art.” She works with a traditional idea of what art is. And she is quick to point out that what constitutes art for her may have little to do with what constitutes art for a given population in a given point in time. When we speak of art today in the current discourse surrounding contemporary art, we speak differently from Arendt. Which is reason enough to consider her definition.

One case in point is the cathedral. It is not a coincidence that Arendt chooses an ornate cathedral to exemplify her definition of art, since art for Arendt is distinguished by having no utilitarian purpose. A cathedral is a place of worship, and thus may serve a purpose. And yet a cathedral itself serves no purpose. The people of Chartres, for example, could gather and worship without their infamous building’s spires and rose window. These elements were made, to quote Arendt, ad maiorem gloriam Dei [for the greater glory of God]. Chartres Cathedral possesses qualities above and beyond any functionality. Art, for Arendt, is this totally non-functional thing that exists in the world merely to appear. Art objects may—and almost always do—have other purposes, yet this is not what qualifies them as art.

Chartres Cathedral, France. This cathedral was built over generations in the 12th and 13th Century.

Art, as Arendt understands it, must also be free from its commodification in the art market. When art is commoditized, it is subject to becoming just like any other consumer commodity, which can be purchased, consumed, and therefore destroyed. Still, I don’t believe that an art object’s status as a commodity necessarily disqualifies it from constituting Arendt’s definition as art. As many contemporary critics, such as Diedrich Diedrichsen, have pointed out, art is not a regular commodity, and it is not assigned value or circulated in the same way, even if it is given a price tag.

“Beauty”—another fraught term in contemporary art discourse – is the quality that makes something last forever, and constitutes the world of appearance. Obviously, this quality is threatened by commodification, which, in theory, reduces art to dollar signs, making a painting’s value equal to that of a luxury apartment. And like a luxury apartment, when it circulates freely in the market, it is subject to demolition. Although, even when art is not circulating in this market, it is subject to destruction.( In the example hyperlinked, it is merely art’s comparison to monetary values that became “rationale” for its destruction. This museum director is what Arendt would call a “philistine”.)

The term “beauty,” like the question “What is art?”, is contentious mainly because it has ceased to mean anything. As the idiom goes, “it is in the eye of the beholder.” Not so, according to Arendt, who deploys this quality normally defined by its subjectivity and indefinability, in a super definitive and specific way. Beauty is the quality that transcends all needs and makes something last through time, and it is not a subjective descriptor. Following Kant, she argues that the person who judges whether or not something is beautiful must put themselves in the place of others who are judging the work in the same time and place, and they must produce judgments to “woo the consent of everyone else” (here I quote Arendt, quoting from Kant) in the hopes of coming to some eventual agreement about what is beautiful.

Consent about what is beautiful is important because it determines what is preserved over time. What unfolds in “Crisis in Culture,” the essay from which I’m drawing and to which I will continue to refer in these posts, is what happens to art and “culture” (which I will have to save for another week) within “mass society.” Or, what happens to the world of appearances, a necessary condition for politics, when everything is produced in order to be consumed (and therefore destroyed)?

Intellectually, though not socially, America and Europe are in the same situation: the thread of tradition is broken, and we must discover the past for ourselves that is, read its authors as though nobody had ever read them before.

–Hannah Arendt, Crisis in Culture

Last spring, I received a call from the director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard asking if I would have lunch with two Swedish artists in town to see the campus and its museum. The artists, part of the YES! Association, a self-declared feminist separatist association for art workers, not only visited the Arendt/Blucher gravesite—a common “attraction” for campus visitors—they sat in on a class at the Hannah Arendt Center, visited Stevenson Library where Arendt’s library and related materials are housed, and began planning ways in which they could interact with the Arendt Center and produce artwork about Hannah Arendt. Åsa Elzén and Malin Arnell, the two representatives from the YES! Association, were not the first visiting artists or curators or other cultural figures who have requested introductions to the Arendt Center and Archives and they certainly won’t be the last. Indeed, there will be a dedication ceremony for the new Hannah Arendt Smoking Porch at the Hannah Arendt Center on October 25th, 2012, a porch that is being designed by YES! Association.

Installation view: Smoking Area (2012) by the YES! Association in “Anti-Establishment”: June 23, 2012 – December 21, 2012. http://www.bard.edu/ccs/exhibitions/anti-establishment/

The art world interest in Hannah Arendt is growing. There are numerous documentary films made and being made about Hannah Arendt and a new bio-picture by Margarethe von Trotta will premier next month at the Toronto Film Festival. Arendt is regularly quoted and invoked at international biennial exhibitions. Hannah Arendt, it seems, is becoming an important figure in contemporary art.

I say “becoming”, because Arendt is not a name historically associated with the practice or scholarship concerning contemporary or even modern art. Although she does write about art in her essay, “Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Political Significance”, from which I excerpted above, and she did consort with figures such as the famous Modernist art critic, Clement Greenberg, it is only recently that artists, curators, and critics have taken an interest in both her and her scholarship.

I am not concerned about why or how this happened (for instance, is it the result of a more general “political turn” in contemporary art, the interest in art’s political dimension over the past decade? Or is it simply the relevance of her scholarship at this particular moment in time?). Rather, I will reflect on how different cultural producers (artists, curators, critics, etc.) are engaging with her work and take my own opportunity to consider the ways in which her scholarship can be useful for understanding contemporary art that does not directly engage with Arendt or her ideas. The question of judgment will also loom over these posts, that is, how do we assess works of art when we have lost our measures, when we are without a banister?

http://d13.documenta.de/#/participants/participants/rene-gabri/

This idea is echoed in the quotation that was at the start of this post, “the thread of tradition is broken.” Arendt insists upon a distinction between “tradition” and the “past.” Tradition, as a thread that runs through the past, connecting specific events in a sequential manner (as Jerome Kohn puts it so eloquently in his introduction to Between Past and Future), is what has been lost or frayed. The past is not lost. It is up to us to look back again, but in a different way. Not coincidentally, the banner on the YES! Association’s website reads, “We are the world’s darkest past, we are giving shape to the future. We will open a new front.” And so it is time to read Hannah Arendt through the lens of contemporary art, and to read Hannah Arendt as a lens onto contemporary art.

I will post regularly about art being produced in and around the Hannah Arendt Center, as well as artwork, exhibitions, and publications relevant to Arendt’s ideas, including a more extensive post on work by the YES! Association.

Last week I discussed Part One of Hannah Arendt’s The Crisis in Culture, and the social importance of the crisis. As promised, this weeks Weekend Read offers you Part Two of Arendt’s incredible reflections on politics and art.

The connection between politics and art is that artworks, if not the activity of the artist, always appear in public. Like words and deeds that appear on the political stage, artworks “can fulfill their own being, which is appearance, only in a world which is common to all.” The public realm offers a space of appearance—an opportunity for display—to artworks that must, as works of art, appear and show themselves to others.

Culture, from the Latin colere—to cultivate, to dwell, to take care, to tend and preserve—is that political and aesthetic judgment that judges what political words and deeds and what works of art will be preserved, cared for, and cultivated in public. Politically understood, culture is an activity of judgment, so that “cultural things” can only be loved and preserved “within the limits set by the institution of the polis.” In other words, the cultural critics and gatekeepers of culture must know which cultural products to cultivate in the political sphere.

Everyone, so I am told, is watching and talking about “Downton Abbey.” It is a TV show, for those living under a bigger rock than I am. So the other day I asked the person charged with keeping me alive to the real world why the show was so compelling.

The answer arrived in my email later that morning in the form of an article: “The Philistine’s Guide to Downton Abbey: Why Everyone in the Universe Should Watch Downton Abbey.”

Cast of "Downton Abbey"

A philistine, let us recall, originally named a biblical enemy, a part of a host so large and superior in numbers that it would overrun Judeo-Christian civilization. In its modern usage, a philistine is part of mass society, those who judge all things in relation to their material or utilitarian values.

So what does a philistine want from “Downton Abbey”? First and foremost, it seems, he wants to be educated. Here I quote from the article on Gawker:

The first season of the show dealt with the sinking of the Titanic, Marxism, and the burgeoning women’s rights movement thanks to the Earl’s progressive youngest daughter, Sybil. This season is all about the Great War, as the Brits call it. It’s teaching history! There are also all those damn costumes and beautiful interiors and characters with complex motivations being penned in by a restrictive society. It’s all the best parts of Middlemarch without having to lug around a thousand page novel all the damn time.

For those who aren’t afraid to lug around Middlemarch as well, the New York Times offered a front-page story Wednesday with book recommendations for those following the series. According to the paper of record, Julian Fellowes, the show’s creator, “has been deliberate about dropping open-ended references into the scripts” that are designed to send viewers to their libraries (or at least their IPads). The show clearly plays into the long-standing cultural demand for entertainment that doubles as education. It seems we are desperate to sugarcoat our need for distraction with the promise that we are actually making productive use of our downtime.

The New York Times article comes complete with recommendations for books of history and poetry, and even other works of historical fiction, each designed to occupy the hours between the episodes of the show. But one essay recommendation was conspicuously absent from the list.

The current mania for “Downton Abbey” calls to mind Hannah Arendt’s essay “The Crisis in Culture,” Arendt’s most powerful explorations of the role of art and the artist in contemporary life. The essay is actually in two parts. Part One addresses the relation between culture and society. Part Two concerns the connection between culture and politics. So this week’s weekend read is Part One of “The Crisis in Culture.” Next week I’ll discuss Part Two. I hope you enjoy it in-between episodes.

In raising the question of the crisis of culture, Arendt is not assuming the mantle of culture warrior. She explicitly refuses to condemn low-brow culture—we all need entertainment. Nor is critical of the masses. The problem she is concerned with has its origins not in mass society but in good society. She is not criticizing those who enjoy their sitcoms. No, her critical eye is focused on the elite PBS viewers of “Downton Abbey.”

Arendt’s essay begins with a distinction between culture and society. Simply put, artists, intellectuals, and defenders of culture accuse society of “philistinism.” The philistine concerns himself only with utility while the cultural artist aims at truth and beauty.

The problem emerges when the philistines come to find that culture is useful. Then the “educated philistine” emerges, someone who seeks to advance his own social standing by monopolizing culture. The educated philistine embraces culture. He collects art, sits on the boards of universities and symphonies, and displays his “contempt for the vulgarity of sheer moneymaking.” The educated philistine despises entertainment and amusement, because no “value” can be derived from it. It is the educated philistine, not the artist, who is the snobbish culture warrior committed to demeaning pure entertainment.

As Arendt tells it, culture comes increasingly to be valuable as a currency that guarantees and advances social standing. But as culture becomes valuable, it loses its distinction from the other values of society. Cultural objects lose their distinction—that they can arrest our attention and move us. Arendt offers the example of Gothic cathedrals, which were built for the glory of God. Of course the cathedrals were useful too, but their immense and extraordinary beauty cannot be explained by their usefulness. Their beauty, she writes, “transcends needs and functions.”

The beauty of cathedrals lasts through the ages. The cathedrals become part of our world, as do mosques and temples, paintings and sculptures, and all the public buildings and political structures that give form and meaning to our otherwise transient mortal lives. Yes, human beings can live without a culture; many have. But when they do, they live simply to live. For Arendt, that is not a distinctly human life in a human world.

We only live in a human world when “the totality of fabricated things is so organized that it can resist the consuming life process of the people dwelling in it, and thus outlast them.” Lasting works of art make our world a human world, they give the world its distinction and its humanity. It is this worldliness that makes the world human. And this worldliness and humanity are born from the work of artists (visual, poetic, and political) who create the lasting institutions and things that give the world meaning as our world. Because culture concerns the lasting and immortal architecture of our human world, it is concerned with art—things made for no other purpose than to be beautiful and true.

The challenge posed by the mania around a show like Downton Abbey is that it is part and parcel of a cultural moment when art abandons its transcendent and protected realm and appeals to the needs of overly busy “educated philistines” who want their entertainment also to be useful. Arendt’s examples are rewritten versions of classics like Shakespeare that are made as entertaining as My Fair Lady. There is nothing wrong with My Fair Lady. But the demand to make Hamlet entertaining—or to make entertainment educational—means, Arendt writes, that “culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.” Hamlet as a great work that can stop us and make us think and re-think our lives and our world can survive neglect; but it cannot survive being repackaged into entertainment. And this raises the true specter haunting Arendt’s essay: that all the cultural goods that make up our world will be repackaged as entertainment, thus loosening the immortal bonds that tie us together as members of a common world. This means, for Arendt, the threatened loss of culture and with it of the specifically human world. As she writes:

The point is that a consumer’s society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all object, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches.